Creativity

Some ups, downs, ins, and outs of writing a book

Art / Creativity / Hands on Practical Experience

Some ups, downs, ins, and outs of writing a book

I'm deep into writing my next book. It takes a lot of work, and I don't just mean time and attention. As part of the process, I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art today. I wanted to see finished great works of art to inspire me, but I also hoped to see something in particular, and I found some examples. I wanted to see sketches and studies. Sometimes a museum will show early practice attempts. I found some such examples today. One was Georges Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. The original is almost 7 feet high and over 10 feet wide, but the study I saw at the Met was a few feet tall. You've seen sketches da…

August 27, 2025

I love developing resilience and strength: AI version, part 1

Addiction / Awareness / Creativity / Freedom / Hands on Practical Experience / Perception

I love developing resilience and strength: AI version, part 1

A recent article on artificial intelligence in the New Yorker wrote about how people who are suffering from loneliness are finding help from artificial intelligence. Some people can't help loneliness, not out of character defect but circumstance. It gets the reader thinking about the elderly, for example, who outlive everyone they've been close to, or it describes as worse, if those who remain are senile. Sorry to give away the ending but it suggests that for however it helps people who can't escape, it will create dependence in far more. The article is A.I. Is About to Solve Loneliness. That’s a Problem: The discomfort of loneliness shapes us in ways we don’t recognize—and we may not like what we become without it. by academic psychologist…

July 15, 2025

I wrote a poem: The Poem of the High-Fiber Diet (trigger warning: juvenile humor)

Addiction / Creativity / Humor / SIDCHAs

I wrote a poem: The Poem of the High-Fiber Diet (trigger warning: juvenile humor)

Am I going to get in trouble for a puerile post? Will it distract from my sustainability leadership focus? I hope not. I had a blast making the poem. Regular readers know my sidchas and standard operating procedures mean that I meditate as one of my first morning activities. Before meditating I go to the bathroom. Between my routine being so consistent and my diet containing so much fiber, I poop every morning around the same time. This morning I woke up about fifteen minutes before the alarm. As I sat on the toilet, my digestive tract wasn't ready to send the poop out, being fifteen minutes ahead of time. The situation brought to my mind the classic poem that people used to write on…

June 13, 2025

Interesting trivial meditation story and book pictures

Awareness / Creativity / Stories

Interesting trivial meditation story and book pictures

I meditate first thing in the morning every day. I've experimented with apps, but found them distracting. I joke that the countdown timer on my phone is my app, set to 33 minutes. I start the timer, then sit down and meditate until it goes off. Why 33 minutes? I ramped up over time and that's where I've reached. I can usually tell around when the time is nearly up. When I started my legs would start to hurt after a few minutes. Now they might feel like they're falling asleep slightly near the end, but not much. Then while meditating the other day, my legs started hurting a lot. I couldn't understand why they hurt so much. Plus it felt like I was meditating…

May 19, 2025

Some of my creative writing and editing process

Art / Creativity / Hands on Practical Experience

Some of my creative writing and editing process

I recently finished a book and a video course on sustainability leadership. Writing means editing. Any creative, expressive work means sketching ideas, composing, outlining, etc. Any creative, expressive work emerges from copious practice work---any painting, musical piece, novel, poem, etc. You've seen sketches by da Vinci, Michelangelo, and so on. I don't keep a writer's or artist's notebook. I don't start by writing on a computer. I start by writing on the backs of scrap paper. I don't write haphazardly, though it probably looks that way since I tend to use every part of the page. I don't have to avoid wasting paper since I live in a culture with more waste paper I can use before recycling it. I need only go to my…

April 12, 2025

What the Spodek Method workshop delivers

Art / Creativity / Education / Leadership / Visualization

What the Spodek Method workshop delivers

I've thought of a simple way to illustrate what the Spodek Method workshop delivers. The mission is to change American and global culture to embrace sustainability by evoking our powerful, basic human emotions relevant to nature. The Spodek Method unearths joy, wonder, oneness, connection, spirituality, divinity, and related passions in people you do it with. They return gratitude. Evoking joy and returning gratitude leads to growing community acting together, achieving wondrous results of everyone loving their part. Here's what I can feel it starting to feel like from the workshop participants and alumni. Candidly, we aren't there yet, but we're on our way. https://youtu.be/uooe16ILaPo?t=93 How do you get a big community rousing and inspiring everyone? Not by lecturing theory at people, hoping they'll form community.…

February 23, 2025

How I wish I could retitle my book. Oh well.

Art / Creativity

How I wish I could retitle my book. Oh well.

I thought of how to improve the subtitle, from The definitive guide to understanding and solving all (yes, all) our environmental problems to The definitive guide to understanding and solving all (yes, all) our environmental symptoms The problem is our behavior, which results from our culture. What we see in the environment is just the physical manifestation of our culture. I've shared the idea with a few friends and they like the new way too. But we can't change it now. It's one of the challenges of authorship. For the rest of your life you can think of ways you could improve it. C'est la vie.

December 19, 2024

Go Alan Go rocking Washington Square Park, teaching kids music

Art / Audio / Creativity

Go Alan Go rocking Washington Square Park, teaching kids music

Alan is a friend and podcast guest. Regular readers know I comment on how people degrade our environment, including public spaces like our parks. Alan is a counterexample, a breath of fresh air. Alan brings fun, life, community, and joy to the park. Between his music and my New York Times article, we're in a friendly competition to see who can improve the park more. I often describe him thusly: I've seen lead singers and guitarists get audiences to put their hands up in the air and wave them around like they just don't care, but never a drummer alone until Alan. He draws crowds in. He gets them dancing, enjoying themselves, meeting each other. Here he is in Washington Square Park getting kids into…

December 16, 2024

See the video from Monday’s book reading

Creativity / Leadership / Nature / Stories

See the video from Monday’s book reading

Monday's book reading featured questions from AJ and participants about the writing process, my experience, what to do oneself, and other personal things. AJ is both supportive and leads people to give their all. We reminisced about my taking her workshop, in which I wrote the book's first draft. Only later did I see that that draft was just the start of writing the book. She asked me to read three sections. She described them all as powerful. I started with the introduction. Next I chose a part illustrating a major advance in how to understand my own self, why I am acting so much more than nearly anyone. Don't take for granted you know why you're doing what you do until you put yourself…

December 5, 2024

The challenge of the winter solstice and misunderstanding leadership

Creativity / Leadership / Nature

The challenge of the winter solstice and misunderstanding leadership

This morning on the way to charge the sign said 34 degrees (1C). The sun was so low on the horizon the usually sunny places I normally charge were in shadow most of the day. The solstice is three weeks away. It will be darker and colder for another three weeks. Then it will be another three weeks to come back to this long a day, though it will be colder. A friend told me she figured not many people would want to live this way, going outside for hours in the cold, not using appliances like a fridge. I was surprised. Who wants to live like this? The point of changing culture is to make living sustainable normal, as it was for 250,000 years…

December 2, 2024

Hear my presentations to grade school kids on Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Nelson Mandela, and spacetime.

Audio / Creativity / Education / Relationships / Stories

Hear my presentations to grade school kids on Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Nelson Mandela, and spacetime.

I recently was invited to speak to grade school children about great physicists. The teacher asked me to speak about Newton, Einstein, and Hawking. Since I didn't have any personal connections to Isaac Newton, I focused on Einstein and Hawking, since I knew people who knew them. I love knowing that I know someone who knew some of the most influential, famous people who lived, whose work was mind-blowing. Though he wasn't a physicist, since I also knew someone who knew Nelson Mandela, I included in the talk my one-degree-of-separation connection to Nelson Mandela. I took questions from the audience (they weren't mic'ed so you couldn't hear them; I marked the silences I edited out with a whoosh noise), which led to me talking about…

November 27, 2024

Come to my online book reading, THIS MONDAY 7pm eastern

Come to my online book reading, THIS MONDAY 7pm eastern

I'm doing a reading NEXT MONDAY, December 2, on Zoom. it's free. Registration is in the email announcement copied below. Or just click here: Register! If you didn't know, I took a writing workshop that helped me write my book. The workshop leader, AJ, cowrites with podcast guest Mike Michalowicz, bestsellers like Profit First. AJ's community is wonderful, especially if you've ever though of writing a book. I'll read some from the book, answer her questions, and field questions from the audience. We'll talk partly about sustainability, also the writing process, which was in many ways a deeply personal journey. I'd love for you to attend. See you there? Register! Mark your calendars for another Monday Night Reading–one unlike any we’ve had before. On December…

November 26, 2024

It’s not climate anxiety. *People* are causing that anxiety, destroying life, liberty, and property with impunity.

Creativity / Leadership / Nature

It’s not climate anxiety. People are causing that anxiety, destroying life, liberty, and property with impunity.

It's natural to think of our environmental problems as issues of science, technology, or markets. We learned of them from scientists. Technologists and business people said they could solve them, but they're social. The environment isn't changing on its own. We're changing it. Pollution destroys life, liberty, and property, mentioned throughout the US Constitution. We feel anxiety not from an effectively abstract "climate," but because people can unilaterally destroy our life, liberty, and property with impunity. Isn't there an entity that is supposed to protect life, liberty, and property? According to even ardent supporters of limited government, it's government. As Milton Friedman put it, “I'm not in favor of no government. You do need a government . . . There's no other institution in my…

August 15, 2024

The Sustainability Simplified Entrepreneurship Strategy

Creativity / Entrepreneurship

The Sustainability Simplified Entrepreneurship Strategy

I see an ever clearer path to humanity achieving sustainability, including governments, corporations, and eight billion individuals. A big part of that vision emerging is seeing that the path isn't hoping for the best. It will result from people acting in their personal interests as much as they can, helping others. Here's a first pass at describing that path as I see it now. I call it our entrepreneurial strategy. The Foundation The Spodek Method creates a mindset shift from seeing acting more sustainably as requiring deprivation and sacrifice to being glad to do it, wishing you did it earlier, and expecting that the more you do, the more you'll want to do more and that sharing it with others will prompt similar feeling plus…

August 6, 2024

Notes for future essay ideas

Notes for future essay ideas

I'm compiling some essays I plan to write, maybe for op-ed pieces, maybe for a next book. I wanted to post them publicly to hold myself accountable, but not give away what they're about before writing them. The result: I'm writing notes to remind me that may not make sense to others. Sorry today's post may not make sense, but it's part of a writing process. Maybe months from now when I've finished some of the essays and published them, you'll get to look back at this page and know where they came from. Carbon taxes and the EPA are a category error The actual challenges of sustainability What corruption looks like The problem isn't the risk of a future collapse or others far away.…

May 29, 2024

My new book title and subtitle

My new book title and subtitle

I'm done editing anything more than grammar or factual errors, and while some slip through on many books, they're all fixed. I've gone through many titles, each working at its stage of development, but this one seems right for launch: Sustainability Simplified The Definitive Guide to Understanding and Solving All (Yes, All) Our Environmental Problems I welcome your thoughts. What do you think?

May 20, 2024

More Life-Changing, Inner-You-Revealing, Passion-Unleashing Magic of Initiative

Creativity / Entrepreneurship / Exercises / Relationships

More Life-Changing, Inner-You-Revealing, Passion-Unleashing Magic of Initiative

A month and a half ago I wrote about Eugene's reflections on finishing the ninth of the ten exercises in my book Initiative in my post The Life-Changing, Inner-You-Revealing, Passion-Unleashing Magic of Initiative. He finished and posted about the tenth exercise at his blog: Method Initiative (Round 4) – Exercise 10: 10 Valuable People (And final Initiative methodology thoughts), and it's as inspiring. Read the whole post for all he shares. As a teaser, what got me most: The 7 Principles If you recall from my Exercise 6 reflection, the 7 key principles to the Initiative methodology are as follows, and this time I decided to include my thoughts regarding each one: Personality matters less than skills you can learn. – Absolutely! I don’t think…

May 1, 2024

Recognized as artist for the first time in a while

Art / Creativity

Recognized as artist for the first time in a while

The MTA Arts & Design department released a book Contemporary Art Underground, about art they install. I felt honored that they invited me to the launch the other evening, especially because they gave name tags to everyone and specified "Artist" for those of us who created art for their program. They didn't make the designation big and showy, though during the talk, they asked all the artists to raise their hands. I may have been looking for what I wanted, but I sensed that we who raised our hands felt honored and appreciated. Here's my name tag: Sorry it got ripped before I took the picture. Here's the invitation: I wouldn't call the event huge, but I'd guess a couple hundred people came and top…

April 12, 2024

My favorite part of Bruce Springsteen’s memoir

Art / Creativity / Education / Freedom / Stories

My favorite part of Bruce Springsteen’s memoir

I recently finished Bruce Springsteen's memoir Born to Run. Below is what resonated with me and motivated me most: Bruce Springsteen wrote in his memoir Born to Run about discovering the guitar growing up in a working-class New Jersey neighborhood. The day after seeing Elvis on the Ed Sullivan Show, “I convinced my mom to take me to Diehl's Music on South Street in Freehold. There, with no money to spend, we rented a guitar. I took it home. Opened its case. Smelled its wood (still one of the sweetest and most promising smells in the world), felt its magic, sensed its hidden power. I held it my arms, ran my fingers over its strings, held the real tortoiseshell guitar pick in between my teeth,…

March 29, 2024

The Life-Changing, Inner-You-Revealing, Passion-Unleashing Magic of Initiative

Creativity / Education / Entrepreneurship / Exercises / Stories

The Life-Changing, Inner-You-Revealing, Passion-Unleashing Magic of Initiative

I've shared Eugene's public postings of his experience doing the exercises in my book Initiative. At each stage, he learns more about himself and making his world work for him. Taking initiative forces you to learn your values, not in some abstract way, but: How do I want to spend my time, money, energy, and resources? How long do I want to follow other people's values, or the worn path society lays for me that benefits others, not me? Quoting his recent post, Method Initiative (Round 4) – Exercise 9 – Second Personal Essay: For the first time ever, I’ve made it to the final exercises in Josh Spodek’s Initiative book on bringing your passions to life. It took four rounds of going back to…

March 15, 2024

Rock star drummer and podcast guest Go Alan Go made my day Sunday

Art / Creativity

Rock star drummer and podcast guest Go Alan Go made my day Sunday

Sunday was the first sunny and warm day of the year, reaching nearly 70 degrees (21C). That's unseasonably warm for the beginning of March, but only compared to the past. Compared to future Marches, it's cool. I spent the morning on the roof, charging the battery. I knew I wanted to head to the park, but feared what I knew I'd see: piles of garbage. People don't just go to the park. They don't prepare food for a picnic there. They don't go and wait to eat until mealtime. They stop at a restaurant or convenience store along the way and bring prepackaged or takeout food or doof with disposable utensils, disposable bags, disposable napkins, and other disposable stuff. Still, I braved it and went…

March 5, 2024

Big milestone: I turned in my latest manuscript yesterday, the last substantive edits.

Big milestone: I turned in my latest manuscript yesterday, the last substantive edits.

Several readers read the last round and reviewed it very highly. I keep tightening it and clarifying parts, which improves it, but the big challenge in settling down to publish is that I'm learning more and faster than ever. This round got some great new stuff. I'm beyond enthusiastic about it reaching shelves and your hands. I won't lie: I also feel anxiety and fear. The reviews that matter to me are yours, the reader's. The process of writing forces me to reflect and clarify. Living more sustainably teaches me more. I can't stop reading and learning about how people did things before that worked, from our grandparents to ancestors farther back to poor people who can't pollute as much as us for lack of…

February 23, 2024

See the Daily Show’s segment on me: “Is it Possible to Live “Off the Grid” in Manhattan?”

Creativity / Habits / Leadership / Nature

See the Daily Show’s segment on me: “Is it Possible to Live “Off the Grid” in Manhattan?”

Here's just the segment with me: and the whole episode (I appear about 11:10). https://youtu.be/MQrpXEF3pZE I liked it more than the New Yorker piece on me, though that's not saying much. I laughed out loud several times, partly since I remember the recording. For example, after she put the Skittles in the kombucha, we saw their dye run off and they turned an unnatural ghostly white. I wanted to share about doof, since the concept is so important, but how much can you fit in a few minutes. I was glad to see they showed me volunteering, delivering food to the community center, and picking up litter. You couldn't tell the volunteering exactly, but it added depth. They linked to a couple of my four…

November 29, 2023

What do you think of this person’s flying habits? (part 1)

Addiction / Creativity / Habits

What do you think of this person’s flying habits? (part 1)

November 8, 2023

Sustainability is skills you practice a lifetime, not a checklist of “ten little things” like journalists promote.

Art / Blog / Creativity / Nature

Sustainability is skills you practice a lifetime, not a checklist of “ten little things” like journalists promote.

When I teach my core sustainability leadership practice, the Spodek Method, in classes and corporate workshops, I have participants pair up and practice it with each other. When there is an odd number of participants, one usually pairs with me, leading me to new commitments on my environmental values. At first I worried I’d run out of commitments after reading many ten-little-things-you-can-do-for-the-environment articles that promote the same things. Those CCCSC bludgeoning tactics (convincing, cajoling, coercing, seeking compliance: the opposite of how I lead) lead people to think there are are small number of things they can do. Even people who want to act meaningfully will do seven and consider themselves one of the good guys. I’ve found the opposite: The more people lead me through…

May 1, 2023

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